Ripple and SettleMint announced a strategic partnership on September 1, 2026 that combines institutional digital asset custody with tools for issuing and managing tokenized assets. According to the official announcement, the integration is intended to give banks, financial market operators and other regulated institutions one foundation for custody, issuance, compliance, settlement and post-issuance servicing. The companies have commenced their partnership offering in Asia Pacific and plan to extend this to other markets as institutional demand develops, as reported by PRNewswire. The partnership combines Ripple Custody's institutional-grade infrastructure with SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), enabling regulated institutions to issue, manage, and operate digital assets through a single platform rather than multiple vendors. As Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint, stated, "Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two."
The partnership integrates Ripple Custody with SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP). Ripple Custody provides infrastructure for holding and transferring cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, supporting configurable access controls, policy enforcement and approval workflows. The platform supports hardware security modules and multi-party computation for key management, with Ripple listing FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification, ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 Type II compliance among its security credentials. Ripple Custody has continued to expand its capabilities over the past year through new partnerships with Securosys and Figment, integration with Chainalysis, and the acquisition of Palisade, simplifying procurement and giving banks, fintechs and corporates a faster, less complex way to secure digital assets. Fiona Murray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Ripple, emphasized that financial institutions across Asia Pacific are asking "how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance," noting this partnership provides "the foundation to roll out digital assets and future-proof them from there."
Ripple and SettleMint cited a May 2026 Boston Consulting Group report to explain the market opportunity, estimating that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035 under its progressive scenario. The BCG report warns that traditional banks failing to adapt face potential 30% profit reductions by 2035, highlighting the urgency for institutional digital asset adoption. The report also noted that banks can leverage tokenized products to transition from traditional intermediation to infrastructure orchestration, creating new revenue streams through tokenized funds, automated collateral mobility, and advanced custody solutions. The companies stated that the initial offering targets regulated financial institutions across Asia Pacific before possible expansion elsewhere globally, with the partnership addressing the growing institutional demand for unified blockchain infrastructure.
Asia Pacific already contains several regulated tokenization programs involving banks, asset managers and market infrastructure providers. Singapore has supported institutional experiments covering tokenized funds, stablecoin settlement and programmable collateral. DBS paired a tokenized money market fund with RLUSD through an arrangement involving Franklin Templeton and Ripple, with future phases expected to examine lending and repurchase transactions using tokenized fund units as collateral. SettleMint's DALP platform is already in use across production and pre-production programmes with institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, providing these institutions the ability to design, issue, and manage tokenized real-world assets. The integration of Ripple's custody solution and SettleMint's DALP platform means institutions can hold and manage digital assets in a regulated, compliant and safe way across the full lifecycle through one integrated solution, with the partnership offering a unified, governed control plane that manages the entire lifecycle of an asset post-launch without multi-vendor assembly or reconciliation gaps.
